Silpheed

The Good
First, for those who don't know who Game Arts is, they are a Japanese company that made the excellent Thexder, a horizontal shooter where you have to zoom across a number of levels playing as either a robot or a jet while battling enemies of increased difficulty. It was released in 1987 and used PC Speaker for sound output. A year later, they produced Silpheed, which uses a variety of sound and graphic cards, and is a big step away from their first game.

The introduction to the game is just amazing. The "super dogfighter" and the space station in which it is housed in are displayed as vector graphics. How the intro is presented to you depends on the type of graphics card you're using. For instance, text that fades in and out are available to EGA owners, while the same text remains static on other cards, and everything is colored differently. You also see glimpses of the enemy ships you have to bring down, and these look good against the green grid.

Then there is the music, which sounds superb if you are playing through the MT-32. I can always remember how the music for the first level goes. There are nice pieces of music, with the same one being used for the boss ships, except the final one. The s

The game is presented in a pseudo-3D viewpoint, and there are twenty levels of the game. It gets easy for the first few levels, but the gameplay gets more frantic as you progress through the levels. Every enemy ship follows you if you try to avoid their gunfire and in the end, you must know how to avoid them or end up dead.

You are equipped with a shield, which depletes as you get hit. If you have no shield left, the way your ship erratically moves in the end is a stroke of genius. You can also get power-ups by shooting asteroids that appear once in a while, and you have the chance to upgrade your weapons in between the twenty levels the game has to offer.

Graphic-wise, you are treated to a sequence in which your ship zooms across spectacular backdrops (after every fifth level). All the enemy ships look good in the game, as they do in the intro. Finally, I like the way the final boss ship is drawn piece-by-piece.

The Bad
The game is so difficult that I only managed to complete up to level three, and having said that, it could have been good to implement a save feature that gets activated in between the levels.

The Bottom Line
As I said much earlier, Silpheed is so much better than Game Arts' previous game, Thexder, due to the use of sound cards and some great features, particularly the number of ways the introduction is presented. The game gets frantic as you progress, but there are plenty of power-ups that are available to you to make things easier. Both the graphics and music are excellent, and there is a nice animation of your ship moving erratically when your shield is empty. if you are looking for an excellent shooter for your old DOS machine, then Silpheed is for you.